Rectangular Iceberg Photographed by NASA Captures Attention

A near-perfect rectangular iceberg in Antarctica photographed by NASA last week has social media buzzing.

The block of ice, with its sharp angles and flat surface, looks more like a man-made structure than a natural phenomenon, but this is because it was "probably recently calved from the ice shelf," NASA ICE said on Twitter.

Kelly Brunt, an ice scientist with NASA told LiveScience that these types of icebergs were fairly common.

"So, here's the deal. We get two types of icebergs," she said. "We get the type that everyone can envision in their head that sank the Titanic, and they look like prisms or triangles at the surface and you know they have a crazy subsurface. And then you have what are called 'tabular icebergs.""

These icebergs, which are wide, flat and long, split from the edges of large blocks of floating ice connected to land, called ice shelves.

"What makes this one a bit unusual is that it looks almost like a square," Brunt said.

The reason its edges are so symmetrical is because it has not been eroded by wind and water yet, indicating that it is still relatively fresh, she added.

The photo captured by NASA was for its Operation IceBridge, which studies the annual changes if sea ice, glaciers and ice sheers, The New York Daily News noted.

The photo on Twitter drew over 4,000 retweets and several thousand likes.

"Earth is adopting the new grid layouts found in app development," one Twitter user joked, while another compared it to tofu.

Others poked fun at flat earth theorists and joked about aliens dropping the iceberg into the ocean.

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